The City of Martins Ferry has been waiting, and waiting, patiently for its purchased supply of new water meters to arrive from the manufacturer.
This area of industry has not been immune to production shortages. For Martins Ferry, that means waiting since last summer for nearly $650,000 in replacement water meters.
The water department did receive a bit of good news recently in the form of a tracking number. It’s not the full order, but 285 meters are on the way and will soon begin to be swapped out.
“The question is, will they be able to keep them coming, and we’re hopeful,” Davies said. “The people have been great about reading the meters and calling the readings in, and we’ve been able to help out some of the residents who’ve been unable to read their own meters.”
The city has roughly 3,800 metered water customers, and about 1,000 of those have failing meters—for now. That number will continue to grow. Davies noted that when the city purchased the meters, they weren’t informed they were battery operated. Those batteries go bad every 10 years or so according to the mayor.
“When they started dying, it was just a fast pace and we couldn’t keep up (getting them changed),” Davies said. “But I wanted to thank the people again for calling in their readings. That way, the readings are accurate, and they aren’t getting charged more down at East Ohio (Regional Wastewater Authority).”
Because of the failings and inability to have the meters read, customers were getting charged an additional $6.30 by EORWA for their portion of the bill. In previous talks with EORWA officials, they and Ferry leadership came to an agreement to forestall the charges until this summer while the meters get swapped out.
However, as long as the citizens call in their readings and the bills aren’t estimated, that too will prevent the extra charge.
That being said, the water department is taking a specific approach to which meters are getting swapped first.
“If we have some people who are unable to read their meters, we will do that for them,” Davies said, speaking of any elderly or handicapped customers experiencing difficulty. “But if there’s absolutely no way they, or we, can do the readings, we’re going to change those meters out first and go from there.”
Water Sales and Power Outages
The mayor noted the sale of water to customers outside of the city of Martins Ferry has been strong.
“We’re now pumping water to Bridgeport and Tri-County,” Davies admitted, relaying that around 3-million gallons per day are pumped for usage combined both inside and outside city limits.
The city can do more, however. It presently has the capacity to pump five gallons, and, with the purchase of an additional filter bed, seven million per day is realistic.
Davies noted the water department has been in talks with both Belmont County water and the City of Wheeling about the possibility of the main trunk line running north and south.
“That way we never have to about running out of water,” Davies said.
Speaking of which, Ferry’s generators at the city water plant did their jump and held service, so that no city water customers had to go without power during the recent snow and ice storms.
But the time didn’t pass without issue.
The generators at the main plant worked flawlessly. However, the pump stations generators weren’t quite as up-to-date and faltered. Fortunately, the city’s water towers had an adequate supply, so the outlying customers didn’t go without water.
Had the power outage gone on for a prolonged period of time, those customers may have had issues. The emphasis here is on “may,” as the city is working to correct that.
“As soon as this transpired, we looked into replacing those two generators,” Davies said. “We have large storage capacity, so those couple of days, we were fine. But if we went without power for a week, we would have been in trouble. So, we’re going to upgrade those as well.”
As usual, the city will look to grants first for money to go toward the generators. Given the situation that water departments experienced across the region, if there wasn’t money specifically available for this issue before, there will be now the mayor believes.
Eyes on Quality
The environmental issues with water in Martins Ferry were not with the city’s water supply, but issues with the Austin Masters Services frack waste processing plant.
Findings were issued by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources about the plant, and there have been meetings and discussions, with some citizens, both from Martins Ferry and outside it, coming to speak on the matter and asking questions.
According to Davies, Austin Masters has fixed those issues. But that hasn’t stopped city officials from working to ensure that its water customers are receiving clean water.
“We sunk two new wells, one of which was a test well which will help us protect the water system,” Davies said. “The other is an expansion. For our own safety, as far as the water is concerned, we’ve passed every test with flying colors so far.
“We haven’t had any discrepancies at all, and we’ve tested for everything you can think of. We have some pretty intelligent workers down there and they take their job very seriously.”
